HSBC is extending the reach of its electronic bond trading platform, which was introduced in response to the changing dynamics of the fixed income market.

The bank has hired a new sales head for the platform known as Credit Place, as it expands the product range to cover US and Middle East products and new currencies.

The new head of sales, Marco Cravero, was previously a director at electronic fixed income market MarketAxess.

The platform, which soft launched in October 2013, provides an order book for selected institutional clients to display the bonds they want to trade. Users can see the details of the trade but the names of the counterparty are kept anonymous. The platform is geared towards facilitating large block trades and matching orders in illiquid instruments.

Credit Place is one of a number of initiatives launched by banks to combat the slump in market liquidity as a result of post-crisis legislation including Basel III. The rules make it more costly for banks to hold bond positions on their balance sheets, making it harder for them to play their traditional market-making role. HSBC does provide some liquidity to the platform but the orders it posts are smaller than the average trade on Credit Place.

The platform currently offers around 1,400 bonds covering investment grade and high-yield bonds traded across HSBC’s London and Hong Kong desks.

Since the start of the year, around 400 trades worth $2.5 billion have been matched on Credit Place, with an average trade size of around $6 million. There are currently 44 clients trading on the platform and the bank hopes to grow this to 75 by the end of the year.

Niall Cameron, head of markets for Europe, Middle East and Africa at HSBC, said: “HSBC’s role is to act as a facilitator of trades by providing liquidity in standard market size, rather than acting purely as a principal. In the last 12-18 months, there has been an acceptance from the buyside on the changing nature of the bond market and they are now working out ways to deal with this issue."

Cameron was promoted to head of markets for Emea earlier this month having previously been HSBC’s global head of credit trading.

Bank-led platforms have met with mixed success. Goldman Sachs’ GSessions platform has seen reduced activity this year, while asset manager Blackrock struggled to get its Aladdin platform off the ground and eventually folded this into a system run by MarketAxess in April last year.

Cameron said: “There will be more losers than winners when it comes to the number of banks that will be able to sustain internal bond trading initiatives. We will put our weight behind collaborative industry solutions where compelling and we think that Credit Place has helped to position HSBC at the middle of this debate.”